I was blasting up New York's Brooklyn-Queens Expressway in that final pot-holed approach to the Triborough Bridge, and I'd just shot through the narrow passage between a Pleistocene-era garbage truck and a shiny steel tanker tagged with a host of diamond-shaped hazard signs.

"You drive a Porsche and all of a sudden you're Bruce Willis," my wife said. I like to think she meant Steve McQueen--Porsches play a part in some of my favorite movies, from Get Carter (the Michael Caine original, not the Sly Stallone abomination) to Slap Shot, and of course, Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!--but I knew her message was simply this: There are three kids in the backseat under the age of 8, and I'd better stop screwing around.

It was the beginning of my search for the perfect family car--something decidedly un-minivan but still vaguely utilitarian. For this test I reasoned that lots of power was safer for the kids, i.e., good for dodging drunks. And I reckoned that looking cool was good for the family too, since, you know, everything is so superficial now and everything. The Porsche was a Cayenne, and it was good. It looked insane--the color of a cherry tomato. In August. One you'd pay too much for at Dean & Deluca. Its color was unlike every other Cayenne I'd ever seen--far more assertive than the dung-colored models that seemed to want to hide, as if to apologize for what whiny purists called Porsche's mercenary move into the SUV market.

So it got stares, and when people saw the three baby seats in the back, it got glares.

The bright red made me paranoid, and although I enjoyed how game the car was on the hills and snaky stonewalled turns of the Taconic Parkway in upstate New York, I took it easy, especially through the speed traps of Duchess County. And for the good of the kids, too, of course.

I could tell the cars passing me were mystified by my steady clip of exactly nine miles an hour over the limit. I swear one guy mouthed the word "Asshole" as he blew past. But the highway ride was terrific, the Cayenne's smoothly forceful V8 with 340 hp helped conceal my road-warrior ways from my squeamish wife, and she said it was the most comfortable car she'd ever spent a weekend in. Off road, it did fine in the little scramble down our dirt road and across the creek to the cabin. Adding further insult to sports car fanatics, it was an automatic--all the Cayennes are--but that's a requirement for the family car search. Even its Tiptronic S shift system can be hard to concentrate on when the kids are brawling and bawling in the back, but it lets you play at real driving and even allows for enough pseudo-downshifting to satisfy the ego.

Back in the city I had terrific confidence zipping around cabs and fighting for my lane. It was the most control I'd ever felt driving something that could ferry kids: if I could think it I could do it, and without too much drama. (The BQE always brings out a little Bullitt in me). It beat the pants off my 10-year-old Volvo 850 wagon, though it wasn't nearly as big. The kids loved it, and filled all the storage spaces with their usual mash of necklaces and doll parts and stickers, but I could tell its size wasn't going to take me much past the pre-teen years, and certainly wasn't going to survive the chocolate lab my wife has been threatening me with.

In a final, mute endorsement, the family refused to speak to me after I dropped off the Cayenne and returned them to our white, banana-peel-and-empty-juice-box-filled Volvo.

--OWEN PHILLIPS